Stop Persecuting Bowe Bergdahl

When you go through the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) School there are a number of things that are literally beaten into you. You are hit in the face and slammed against walls. Rifle butts and barrels strike you in the head. You are placed in small wooden boxes and deprived of food and sleep, and some of you are water-boarded (yes, it is torture). But the most important and beneficial aspects of the training are the psychological pressures and forces you are subjected to. You are taught what you should expect and what it is you should do to mentally survive captivity as a prisoner of war. You learn through practice to depend on your fellow prisoners and, most importantly, to hold fast in your faith and the knowledge your country will never forget you and the United States will always come for you.

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I went through SERE training in southern California in 2000. It was April, so the hot desert days quickly became cold desert nights. With little water, no food, (you do, however, get to eat bugs, cactus and rabbits) and only a piece of parachute and a fellow Marine for warmth and shelter, you are forced to put your training into practice and rely upon not just the physical strength of your fellow trainees but their mental strength. Implicit in that reliance is the understanding you will support one another and that, in turn, you will not be abandoned. The core concept of SERE is “Return Home with Honor,” and again you are holding faithful to the conviction you will not be forgotten. To finish off your training, American commandos rescue you from the prisoner of war camp in a simulated raid. The contract is clear: Never give up, because you will never be forgotten and you will never be left behind.

A few years later, I went to war in Iraq. I saw friends die and took part in a process and system of killing that that was justified by a nonexistent, made-up threat to American national security. A foreign country, innocent of any crimes against the United States, was plunged into a barbaric and horrifying civil war, a war that is still slaughtering its citizens. Even with all of the mendacity and madness of the Iraq war, coming home plagued with survivor’s guilt and moral injury, you still believe in the institutions, you still believe in the ideals and principles that say you will not be forgotten, that your nation owes you a debt and that debt will always be met.

Today I’m not sure if I know any veterans who still believe such platitudes. Most of us cringe at the yellow “Support the Troops” bumper stickers that still adorn some cars—mostly they are the non-magnetic kind that are pasted on and not easily removed. Many Americans would be surprised to know the United States still has 33,000 troops in Afghanistan, 12 of whom, including two teenagers, were killed this past month in what is America’s historically most unpopular war. We veterans are among the few who still pay attention to the mostly unnoticed and pointless dying in a war that 84 percent of Americans are against, and we also find ourselves cursing under our breath during the cheers and ovations for the veteran without legs in the wheelchair who gets free tickets to a baseball game, but who can’t get timely or thorough physical and mental health care and who has a pretty good chance of killing himself someday. According to Veterans Administration figures, some 22 veterans are now committing suicide every day—and the average hasn’t fallen below 18 a day since 9/11, which means that something like a total of 100,000 veterans have killed themselves since then. Loud clapping, free food and your face on the Jumbotron during a rousing rendition of a Lee Greenwood song seems to be what you are owed, not health care, disability assistance, adequate job training or a public and truthful accounting of why these wars were fought and why they were lost. Our youngest veterans, those who bore the brunt of the death and mutilation in these wars, have a 22 percent unemployment rate. The generals who lost these wars teach at Stanford, USC and Yale.

Matthew Hoh, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a former Marine Corps captain, worked as a State Department official in Afghanistan until he resigned in protest in 2009, saying U.S. policy was not working.